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[Kagetenshi]

A militia is by definition composed of non-soldiers.

~J

[Deamon_Knight]

Kagetenshi

Are you suggesting that all Males are 18-34 in Switzerland are, in fact, standing military personnel? If this is, Geneva convention type Legality TRUE military assets, what kind of training do they receive? What kind of oversight is there? No Flame, I honestly would like to know.

Basically the question is, do Swiss citizens who are in this branch of their military have fundamentally different exposure and access (Firepower-wise, availability-wise, education-wise, and legal wise) to Firearms than non military (militia) US Citizens.

The point here (And I hope I haven't crossed any lines because I don't think I've argued for or against anything here) is that the comparison between members of the Swiss home guard and American Citizenry is made to question the assertion that "Availability of Firepower" can be directly related to gun violence, because it would seem that a Large portion of the Swiss population has available to them significantly more Firepower than any segment of the American population.

My question then becomes, what training, oversight, and exposure to firearms do you think that Swiss Citizens gains from the Change in Legal status from civilian to Military that makes their experience with firearms fundamentally different from an American civilian?

[BitBasher]

[Deamon_Knight]

Bit, it is not Illegal to own a Fully automatic weapon in the United States. Any Citizen can own one, but it requires a Federal Firearms Class III license, that costs about $200 per year (also subject to local Laws).

[BitBasher]

Not quite:

[Deamon_Knight]

I was simply pointing out, in reference to availability of such weapons on Switzerland (apparently, nearly all 18-34 males have one), that these weapons could be aquired by nearly anyone , that nearly every male 18-34 in the US could also have, not that they were infact owned by many people in that demographic. Illegality suggests a prohibition, not just heavy regulation.

[Kagetenshi]

They are in fact conscripted, spend 18 to 21 weeks in training, and spend 300 days in active service. Practically speaking there are some people who get out of it for physical or mental reasons, and to a certain degree I'd imagine they'd let out anyone who tried to get out (though they do add an additional 2% income tax to anyone not serving for the duration of what would have been their service). After their active service, they receive three weeks of training every year or every other year; I'm not sure what determines who goes yearly and who biyearly.

Edit: turns out anyone with moral or other objections to military service may apply for civil service instead (and not pay the additional tax), so they probably would not in fact be lenient on those attempting to be exempted for physical or mental reasons.

~J

[Deamon_Knight]

And you assert that the extra government sponsored training encourages safer more responsible use of military grade hardware?

[BitBasher]

[hyzmarca]

To elaborate, there are about 728,000 legaly possessed fully automatic firearms registered in BATF databases. This number is probably low since the BATFs records have been found to have 50% error rate. As a result of this error rate, illegal ownership of fully-automatic weapons is unlikely to be prosecuted at the federal level in the near future.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/R?r104...4:FLD001:E51461

I'm sure quite a few of these weapons are owned by movie prop warehouses and many others are owned by police departments. The actual numbers of citizens with personal Class III liscenses is fairly low.

It should be noted that one one federaly registered machine gun has been used for a violent crime since the law went into effect and that crime was commited by a police officer.

The assertion that training helps prevents criminal use is silly. However, training does help prevent stupid accidents and collateral damage, which are far more sensationalized than criminals killing each other.

Generaly speaking, a person with a government permit of some sort, no matter if it is a Class III license or a state concealed carry permit, is far less likely to commit a crime than a person without such a permit. Also most criminals obtain their weapons through illegal or quasi-legal channels.

This is a very useful site for anyone interested in learning about US gun crime.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/guns.htm

Unfortunatly, I know little about European gun crime. However, it is worth noting that crime reports from Britain may be skewed because they do not include statistics for political terrorism. This policy was intended to artificially lower the crime rate during the IRA's heyday.

Also, Israel, which has a policy similar to Switzerland suffers from a phenomenally low homocide rate despite suicide bombers. I'm not sure if Isreali officials include terrorist acts in crime respots, however I've seen no indication that they don't.

[Clyde]

As an additional factoid, the new manufacture of machine guns for private ownership and the importing of machine guns for private ownership have been curtailed as of 1986 and 1968 respectively. Thus, the supply of fully automatic firearms that are available for private sale is fixed. Because these guns are at least 20 years old now (and many much older) they tend to be in the hands of collectors.

[Trashman]

Gawd, sorry, but I can't bother adding anything to the discussion on right or wrong, over-my-dead-cold-body, is-Michael-Moore-God or whatever. Wasn't there somewhere in the guidelines or wherever this bit about keeping politics out?

Anyway. To add a bit perspective from Germany:
When the Iron Curtain went down all of a sudden there were dozens of stalls on flea-markets selling medals, uniforms and insignia of the Soviet era. I'm from Frankfurt, so we got a more than fair share of eastern people in the city, being European traffic hub and all that.
The same people who sold you mortar board shoulder patches of Soviet Marines also had something on offer underneath the counter...
Not AKs but Tokarevs at least.
This of course being the real fifth world and not the -ehrm- more liberal sixth, the police soon got the better of them.
But in any case they were able to get the hardware into the country. Add to this the influx of refugees - real ones and not so real ones - from the Balkans and you're set to let things go boom. So SR countries of middle and central Europe should have places where you might outfit a small army...

In the past few years Germany experienced student shootings just like the US. Nothing on the scale of Columbine but decidedly copycat, down to shotguns and black dusters. So teenage murderous insanity isn't a US-only thing.
These sad cases got their weaponry from their dad's basement, some allegedly just went to a shop and bought them with a bit of fast-talking the owner.
Laws are indeed quite harsh around here (and that's good) but as in role-playing games: rules are there to get around them. And it unfortunately works.

[Kagetenshi]

I would seriously question the assertion that the Sixth World is more liberal. I'd argue just less effective, governmentally speaking.

~J

[Austere Emancipa...]

I would assert that's why the "-ehrm-" is there.

[locomotiveman]